If we go back in history to where the ancient Greek Myth about this Labyrinth pattern we are using originated, we see that the myth surrounding it involves a half man /half beast, which lives in the centre of the labyrinth. It was also at this time in history that we were moving out of the Goddess centered consciousness into the Masculine (our thinking). All the stories before this one spoke about there being a woman in the centre. These stories can be traced back about 15 000 yrs.
“Lets look at this myth as a dream meeting of patriarchal assertive Greek consciousness with a Goddess-oriented Minoan civilization. Our hero, the dream ego, is a Greek.
The Minotaur had a human body but a bulls head, hence he was ruled by his animal nature. This represents the ’shadow self’ our animal instincts, inherited in our evolution from lower life forms. It contains sexual and aggressive impulses, which the conscious ego cannot approve of. King Minos contained the Minotour, the keeper of the shadow in the labyrinth.
Then along comes Theseus, an archetypal human hero of the the next age, who stood for patriarchal ideas, might makes right, logic over intuition, and above all, male rule. Theseus bravely went down into the Labyrinth and killed the ’shadow’.”
“Theseus went to this monster, his shadow- all the dark things Greece didn’t want to look at, feed, or deal with- and slew it. As a result, western man did not have to look at his shadow again, until this century when Carl Jung began talking about it so persuasively.”
SIG LONEGREN ANCIENT MYTHS AND MODERN USES. ISBN 0-8069-7407-9
JACQUES ATTALI THE LABYRINTH IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
“Attali offers a historical analysis of how we elected, over the centuries, to rid ourselves of the indirect path for the supposed superiority of the straight line. We moved from the meandering to the linear, from the complex to the singular, from the curved and sensual to the straight and narrow. Consequently our thinking became shallow and unable to grasp the depth of meaning the labyrinthine symbolic world held for us. Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, this daedal depth of wisdom is recapturing our imaginations. The complex patterns enfolded with these ancient designs are calling us to reclaim the lost and forgotten parts of ourselves.”
REV. DR LAUREN ARTRESS.
“A CODED MESSAGE
For many years, I have been engaged in an effort to uncover signs of the most diatan future in some of the least accessible stigmata of the past. The more these studies progress, the more they convince me that everything in our self-created human future - draws its inspiration from the imagination of those eighty billion human beings who preceded us on this planet over the last three million years. Among the many signs that they have left for us in such a myriad of ways, the labyrinth is one of the most important. Though one of the most haunting and universal of symbols, it has also been one of the least clearly interpreted.
But the sense of it I wish to emphasize is the labyrinth as the last message transmitted from collective nomadic to sedentary peoples. It is as if they had foreseen that their distant descendants would someday return involuntarily to a nomadic existence, and might be able to rediscover in these forgotten designs a wisdom necessary for the future.”
JACQUES ATTALI THE LABYRINTH IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY ISBN 9-781556-432651
Attali among other things served as the special adviser to President Mitterrand, and has advised the UN on nuclear proliferation.
